eekly trip to
Rosewater with her produce: she used her own incubators in bad weather.
A visit to San Francisco she did not attempt, and she was quite sure
that the daily conversation over the telephone--when it had not blown
down--was as sufficing for Lady Victoria as for herself. She read and
studied and dreamed, became indifferent to what she chose to call her
failure as a society ornament, and planned a larger future; to be
realized when she had come to care less for dreams and more for
realities. No doubt that state of mind would develop before long, and
meanwhile she might as well enjoy herself according to her present mood.
Nothing could alter her belief that all unhappiness came from contacts,
and certainly she had proved her theories so far, and took a pagan joy
in mere living. She loved the wild battle of the elements, the waste
below her garden, with as keen a sensuousness as the spring and the
flowers, and often sat late in her red room by the fire to enjoy its
contrast with the desolation without.

But Gwynne was not a man to be dismissed from the thoughts of any one
that knew him as well as his cousin, He had taken his part in her life
as a matter of course, and of late they had been very intimate. During
the first days and nights of his mother's illness, they had talked, or
sat in companionable silence, by the hour. She had been assailed by
regrets more than once that she was to have no part in his life, that he
had already won some of his hardest battles with no help of hers, and
deliberately had matched their spirits and driven her off the field
where she had subtly sought to manage him. She liked him the better for
this, but while her vanity retired with philosophy, she regretted her
inability to help him. That she had it in her to assist and encourage
him in many ways, she needed to be told neither by himself nor his
mother, but she was unwilling to pay the price. That she felt his charm,
took an even deeper interest in him since he had announced his intention
to marry her, she did not pretend to deny, and sometimes caught herself
looking out upon a future in which he had as inevitable a part as if it
had been decreed from the beginning of time. She also dreamed of the
satisfaction and pleasure it would give her to make him really love her,
become quite mad about her. But again she was unwilling to pay the
price. She argued that this was merely due to the persistence of the
solitary ideal; and refused